For me, Microsoft PowerShell is hard! I can’t wrap my mind around data pipelines (|). Instead, I keep reverting to if/then, loops and other traditional programming paradigms, similar to what I’d do in UNIX shell!

Every time Apple releases a new version of macOS, I have to go in and re-configure Apache with PHP the way I want it. So this time, I thought I’d automate the configuration changes with a single command.

If the preceding posts on Node.js and MongoDB have been too complex for you, let me introduce you to a simpler drag-and-drop “flow-editor,” Node-RED.. It was developed and open-sourced by IBM, and is now hosted by the OpenJS Foundation (the same foundation that hosts projects like jQuery, and Dojo). I’ve used Node-RED for quick prototypes and demos, as it’s easy to explain each step of the flow. It saves a lot of coding effort and reduces errors buy providing built-in and pre-built third-party “nodes”.

I have an unusual workflow when copying photos from my camera's SD card to my Windows desktop. For any photos I my desktop, I want to also delete on the SD card. In this post (part 1 of 2), I describe my PowerShell script to "repeat" what I deleted on the desktop on the SD card. In my next post, part 2, I expand the PowerShell script to (try) monitor for file system changes instead.

I sometimes need to search a huge CSV file (13 MB), containing 21,000 rows and roundabout 40 columns, which Numbers takes half a minute to open. All I need to do is search and display the results of a few columns only... so I wrote a bash script to do this for me - and I was quite specific in that I wanted the results in color!

I recently had the "opportunity" to perform some text manipulation to get data from a huge log file into a spreadsheet. I had done this sort of work a long time ago as a developer, but had forgotten over the years. So I decided to compile a text manipulation cheat-sheet for macOS.

Since 2012, all apps on the Mac App Store must run in an app sandbox, which restricts access to system resources unless explicitly required. The secure sandbox isolates the app and defines access controls, protecting users from malicious code with undesired behaviour.

Here's how to setup a sandbox for an app downloaded from outside the Mac App Store.